Finland’s residents now face being caught short during car trips if their phones are out of credit, because the country’s road management agency has introduced an SMS entry system for public toilets.
Called the SMS Lock System, users must text “OPEN” to a number shown on the door of various toilets and shower rooms along Highway …

no texting required

Disturbing trend

While my thinking may seem ironic since I'm in the IT industry, I find the current trend of e-everything very disturbing. Some may even claim that this scheme is discrimination against those who do not have mobile phones (yes, there are some people without, if you can imagine). Not everyone wants to be "connected" 24/7. Should we really punish them for it?

Yeah - this'll really work well...

Bad idea

Never mind charging money for a biological necessity. What about people who don't have cell phones? They could have lost it, they could have one but the battery's dead, or they just don't feel it is worth the monthly charge. Then they pee on the lock or otherwise disable it so the next person can't get in either...

Won't reduce vandalism.

If I want to vandalize one of these toilets, this won't stop me. In fact it would probably make it easier to get away with it. All I do is pinch my friend's phone while he's not looking, text to open, and then trash the place. Return the phone before he notices, and he'll get the blame and I'll get away unpunished.

Better put a bucket out back

What you are supposed to do

if you can't use the restroom, and you really can't wait, as near as I can figure is pee yourself since pissing behind a tree will get you put on the sex offenders registry if they catch you. Hard luck I tell ya.

Hanging about for the text to go through…..

Clean toilets AND shower rooms are worth paying a little for

RE: Running out of credit \ anonymity

Pay-As-You-Go is very new in Finland. The vast majority of people have contracts (in a country with a 105% penetration rate). Sure, you could have mobile phone problems, but then again, you could just as well have no change. Public toilets that require payment are not rare, this has long been accepted.

RE: Presumably you have to text the word in finnish.

No, you text the word OPEN.

RE: That said, Finns are basically honest enough to actually use the damn things...

This is probably true. It is also a country where it is not unfathomable that you could ask somebody to kindly unlock the door for you (texts are inexpensive).

RE: Text is not reliable enough for me to trust this.

Maybe Finland has a better telecommunications infrastructure? A fair few services employ this technology with few problems.

RE: New Years Back-LOG

These are fairly remote locations near towns with populations of 10 and 25 thousand. The overloading of mobile networks happens quite rarely in Finland. Maybe occasionally at large music festivals, and the situation is constantly improving.

@there are some people without, if you can imagine

I don't have to imagine, I don't have one. I can see see this appealing to your average no friends facebook user who is so sad that texting a toilet in front of them is probably the nearest thing they are going to get to real face to face communication.

Hanging about......

Too true, too true.

Next time someone comes up with a fancy support model involving text alerts, publicly request that the author checks the guaranteed service delivery time for an SMS with the Telcos. Always a great way of getting egg on the face of some smarmy git that one.

Also one of the reasons that medics still use pagers. Since I've been in the situation a few times where getting a pee is at least as urgent to me as getting to a coronary victim is to them, I don't like this idea too much.

@ most of the comments here

First of all, it says to text OPEN. Whoever dredged up the list of Finnish words, most of those are derivatives, the Finnish equivalent would be AVAA, not employing Ä or Ö characters at all. Finns are very used to having English words scattered around.

Second, Finland does indeed have a very well-developed telecommunications backbone - you can buy transport tickets for bus/metro/trams as a text ticket within the Helsinki metropolitan area, and there are some sweet machines somewhere in the central railway station that accept text messages as payment too.

Finally, those pay-toilets do indeed tend to be made quite strongly - we're not talking about those blue plastic portaloos that you see at rock concerts. In the streets of Helsinki you can find grey metallic pay-toilets sitting at street corners. Not as out-of-place as you'd think.

That said, none of the above applies to a place like the UK, where all of the moans and problems in these comments probably apply quite rightly. This just would not work in the UK.

Bad Bad Bad

After moving it took an act of God to get out of our contracts w/o the early termination fee....(old service not available here)

Only 2 cell companies here and I don't like either company, us cellular and alltel.

Right now I'm also being somewhat of a tightwad, just don't feel like spending $80 per month on a stupid cell phone. It's really nice not being able to be found 24/7. Also I won't sign a 2 year contract we never did before.

And another point in my case. We ALWAYS had text messaging disabled on our accounts. We had some dirty spam messages come through so since then just had the service turned off. I don't even remember how to text. You know what? I like it that way. We actually visit with each other uninterrupted....